The Power of 8

For quite a while now, honor has been the brand of choice when it comes to looking for affordable smartphones. Their phones are a good mix of reliability and affordability, which makes them a pretty popular choice here. With the honor 8 however, the brand is looking to shake things up a little bit.

The honor 8 sports a 5.2 inch Full HD screen, and is powered by Huawei’s Hisilicon Kirin 950 processor, one of the more high-end processors in the Kirin line. As far as memory and storage goes, the honor 8 has 4GBs of internal memory, and users get to choose between 32 and 64GBs of storage space. If that’s still not enough, there is also a microSD card slot that allows storage expansion of up to 128GBs of storage space.

At the back is a 12MP dual-sensor camera, and a 3D fingerprint scanner, while a 6MP shooter adorns the top front of the phone. The fingerprint scanner is the one used in many of Huawei’s high-end phones, and it is incredibly fast, unlocking the phone and starting apps as soon as you place your finger on it. It is now also a button, called Smart Lock, which you can use to program a variety of shortcuts.

The honor 8 is easily one of the most intriguingly-designed phones we’ve seen from the company. The 15 layer glass grating effect on the back, and the use of rounded edges and 2.5D panel ensures that the aesthetics look as smooth as possible from all angles. Our only complaint is that due to the glassy construction, the phone is very slippery, and we would recommend that you get a case for this phone if you don’t want to risk it shattering if you dropped it by accident.

Using the honor 8 is a charm. Throughout our time with it, the Kirin 950 processor performs tasks that is asked of it admirably well. There was little to no lag whatsoever, be it typing messages, taking photos, recording videos and even playing games on it on the fly. It switches tasks effortlessly, with the only complaint we have is that it does have a tendency to heat up a bit when running CPU-intensive tasks for a bit too long.

That being said, the honor 8’s 3,000mAh battery life is also quite impressive. With some minimal tweaking, we managed to get the battery to last an entire day, from morning to late evening with moderately heavy use.

CHIP CONCLUDE: The honor 8 might be a bit more pricey than what most are used to with this brand, but considering the internal specs, it is a very powerful phone at its pricepoint.